Motions to Unfurl | 22.11.2025- 17.01.2026

Motions to Unfurlcurated by Heike Dempster

“Motions to Unfurl” brings together Ye Cheng, Eunju Hong, and Jiwon Song to examine how hybrid forms of life and perception emerge from the entanglements of technology, mythology, and material culture. The exhibition unfolds as an inquiry into how bodies—both human and more-than-human—become sites where belonging, loss, and transformation are inscribed. Through painterly, sculptural, and performative interventions, the artists probe the boundaries between memory and matter, past and future, visibility and disappearance, and the exhibition unfolds as a dialogue that extends beyond the gallery walls into the porous terrain of memory, imagination, and the posthuman.

Ye Cheng reinterprets the literati traditions of Song Dynasty landscape painting within a diasporic and transmodern context. Her work — drawing inspiration from Wang Ximeng’s Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers — reconstructs imaginary topographies that merge classical Chinese poetics with the spatial logic of Western abstraction. Using industrial synthetic silk and layered wet media, Cheng creates painterly surfaces that oscillate between tactility and illusion, landscape and architecture. Geometric incursions fracture his luminous terrains, articulating a dialogue between intuition and reason, dream and design. Grounded in Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the “Third Space,” her practice repositions cultural hybridity as a generative site where identity, displacement, and memory intersect.

Eunju Hong’s multidisciplinary practice interrogates the affective residue of technological systems. Through performance, video, and installation, she examines how technological mechanisms mediate human vulnerability. Her ongoing engagement with East Asian puppetry and mask theatre informs an exploration of corporeal proxies and spectral presences. In her performances, a 3D-printed puppet modeled after her own body becomes a mirror for loss and self-alienation—its animation by another performer producing an uneasy choreography of intimacy, absence, and control. Hong’s fragmented narratives resist linear logic, foregrounding the sensory and emotional ruptures produced by our entanglement with machines.

Jiwon Song extends the realm of the invisible through sculptural speculation. Drawing from folklore and the thermodynamic principle of entropy, she imagines “ghosts” as dispersed energies that coalesce through collective memory and storytelling. Her wax figures and hybrid objects—mutations of furniture and forgotten spirits—transform entropy into a metaphor for cultural decay and renewal. Through these spectral assemblages, Song reconsiders the afterlives of objects and myths within contemporary material culture.

Together, Cheng, Hong, and Song articulate a constellation of gestures that unfurl across time, matter, and myth—an expanded ecology of seeing and feeling that situates the human within an ever-shifting continuum of becoming.

Text by Heike Dempster

Installation views

Artists

Ye Cheng

Ye Cheng (b. 1992, China) is a Chinese American artist based in New York. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons School of Design (2022) and a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2016). Rooted in her experience as a first-generation immigrant, Ye’s practice explores home, identity, and the shifting boundaries of belonging through themes of displacement, mobility, and cultural memory.

Her work has been exhibited at Latitude Gallery (solo), NADA Miami, the United Nations Headquarters, Chambers Fine Art (New York), Make Room (Los Angeles), RHAA (Chicago), and Soka Art (Beijing). She was featured by Artnet as one of the “5 Artists on the Verge of a Breakthrough” (2023) and has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, NARS International Residency, and the Swatch Peace Art Hotel Shanghai (2024).

Eunju Hong

Eunju Hong (b. 1993, Seoul) is a visual artist living and working between Germany and South Korea. She studied at the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, where she graduated as a Meisterschülerin under Julian Rosefeldt. A former DAAD scholar (2020–2022), she received the Medienkunstpreis Stiftung Ingvild und Stephan Goetz and the Bayerische Kunstförderpreis in 2024. Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Goethe-Institut Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, Kunstarkaden Munich, and Taipei Artist Village.

Jiwon Song

Jiwon Song (b. Busan, South Korea) is a South Korean artist based in Munich, Germany. Her work explores the boundary between the visible and imagined, reimagining “ghosts” and forgotten spirits through drawings and wax sculptures. By transforming discarded objects into hybrid “ghost-furniture,” she brings ephemeral beings back into the world, blending humor, melancholy, and curiosity. Song studied Painting at Ewha Womans University (BFA, 2017) and currently at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. Her work has been shown internationally, including Munich, Brussels, Seoul, and Zurich.